As I posted the other day, I've fallen in love with the power of the limited palette!  Today, I want to show you the work of my friend, Doug Hall, who uses ONLY a limited palette consisting of Alizarin Crimson, French ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow and titanium white oil paints by Winsor Newton.  I'm using the same palette now, except that I haven't decided on what red I want to use.

Doug's paintings of the Shawnee from the time of the French and Indian Wars are museum quality and are sold into the collector's market.  In other words, his art is top tier!  

Doug lives and works in a log cabin that he built himself, including the harvesting of the trees for the logs.  It's in the Huckleberry Forest in southwestern Missouri.  He also has a gallery in Neosho, Missiouri that he hand built himself.  His hobby is handbuilding and shooting black powder rifles which he also uses as props in his paintings.  Every Sunday, he and his friends gather in back of his gallery in Neosho to shoot their black powder rifles.  

Another interesting fact about his work is that he uses only one brush for his 3 foot by 4 fot paintings, a #4 round synthetic that he buys at Hobby Lobby.  Proof that the talent of the artist is more important than how much is spent on materials and tools.   

If you would like an original oil painting by Doug, you need to know that they sell about as fast as he can paint them, so you'll need to settle for a giclee print!  

You can see more of his art and order prints at https://doughallgallery.com/    The main image for this post is from his website.

A fantastic artist!

Mike

Just about everybody has heard about the artist, Claude Monet, but not many know about his mentor and friend, Eugene Boudin.  Boudin is actually the one who first inspired Monet to try painting outdoors where he could observe and capture the changing light.  Before Boudin persuaded Monet to come to the northern coast of France to paint the ocean and skies there, Monet was a charicature artist in Paris.  So we owe a lot to Boudin!

Monet himself credited Boudin with his success as a painter when he said, "If I became a painter, it is to Eugène Boudin that I owe that fact." Boudin's influence on Monet is obvious in Monet's early paintings which could easily be mistaken for Boudin's work. 

What we find with both of them is that they had a strong preference for painting "en plein air".  I do't think either of them would be interested in painting from photographs today!

Eugene Boudin specialized in painting ocean beach scenes and is particularly noted for his skies, which are incredible in the original paintings.  Unfortunaly a lot is lost is photographic reproductions of his paintings. According to Boudin, even though his paintings are incredible, they don't match the glory of God's creation.  

Boudin said, "Nature is richer than I represent it.. .Nature is so beautiful that when I am not tortured by poverty I am tortured by her splendor. How fortunate we are to be able to see and admire the glories of the sky and earth; if only I could be content just to admire them. But there is always the torment of struggling to reproduce them, the impossibility of creating anything within the narrow limits of painting."

Monet's thoughts were similar.  "It is extraordinary to see the sea; what a spectacle! She is so unfettered that one wonders whether it is possible that she again become calm."  

Monet - Beach at Trouville

This is why two of the first artsts to paint outdoors found painting "en plain air" so fascinating.  And also why I believe they would be frustrated if they had to paint from photographs today!  

Following up on my earlier post about the limited or minimal palette, I wanted to share a video by Mark Carder, who I learned this palette from.  A link to the video is below.

To re-cap, I am fascinated with the three color minumal palette of pyrrole red, ultramarine blue, and cad yellow light.  Plus titanium white.   Mark adds a burnt umber to this palette, but I can mix a pretty close burnt umber!  When I use the process Mark teaches in this video, I usually just mix the burnt umber in it.  

The more colors we have on our palette, the more likely we are to lose color harmony in our paintings and the more likely we are to end up mixing "mud", defined as dull, lifeless, uninteresting colors.  In fact, having a lot of colors on our palette will be much more difficult and confusing to use.  The rule of thumb is that to avoid mixing muddy, lifeless, the artist should never mix more than three pigments together.  The three primary palette automatically takes care of that issue!

So, the colors I am mixing now tend to be much cleaner and fresher and I have also found that every color I mixed from my old 12 color palette can be duplicated with just the three color primary palette!

Here's the video I promised.  

Mike

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNB3XY67Q-I

I am beginning to paint with a minimal palette and am thoroughly enjoying it!

My palette pyrrole red, French ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow light and titanium white.  With just these colors, I can mix 99% of the colors in nature!  Even better, the colors I mix are clean...no more muddy colors.  The rule of thumb for artists to avoid muddy colors is to use no more than three pigments when mixing.  White is OK.  If there are only three pigments on your palette, it is impossible to mix a muddy color.  Muddy colors are dull, lifeless colors, so now even if I am painting mud, the colors are clean and attractive!

My portraits are all done with this palette and I am beginning to use it for my landscapes.

Another artist who uses this palette is Doug Hall in Neosho, Missouri.  One different in his palette is that he uses alizarin crimson as his read.  Take a look at his incredible work!

https://doughallgallery.com/